Speech of Hon. Richard Yates, Delivered at Elgin, Ill., on the Fourth Day of July, 1865.

Richard Yates

Jacksonville [Ill.] : Ironmonger & Mendenhall, 1865

[The Best of America: An Early Argument for Civil Rights and Universal Suffrage] An attractive, clean pamphlet.  Clean, unmarked pages. 8 p. ; 22 cm. Monagham 832. 

Yates was the Governor of Illinois during the Civil War.  A friend of Lincoln, he was one of the most energetic governors in the Union.  He also notably commissioned U.S. Grant.  In this wartime July 4th address, Yates commemorates the deeds and ideas of the American Revolution and puts them in a Civil War context.  He explains to his audience the principles America is fighting for.  His words are rousing and represent the best of the American heritage. Echoes of Lincoln's Emancipation proclamation and a precursor to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s I have a dream speech can be heard.

Yates says: "They are gone, but the great truths enunciated therein survive, and will survive, a perpetual declaration to all the world, from generation to generation, of man's intrinsic, essential manhood, and of the great, undying, the eternal principles of individual and universal human liberty. The American revolution was begun and fought through for an idea — to establish that man is a man — to vindicate the right of every man to equal rights and to equal citizenship, not by virtue of his birth or fortune, or of his nativity or color, but by virtue of his intrinsic, God-created manhood."  "Our fathers asserted the great principle of the equal, inalienable rights of all men, not upon any abstract deduction of their own reasoning - not upon any mere human dogma - but planting themselves upon the firm foundations of God's eternal truth and justice, they declared that they were endowed, not by man, but by their Creator, with these inalienable rights ; and that to secure these, governments were instituted among men, deriving their just power from the governed. Here is the whole principle of the government - that all power originates from the will of the people; that each citizen shall have his equal share in the burdens and the privileges of the government ; that however men may differ from each other in physique or in intellect, or in any of the elements of human character, they are all equal before the law - that so far as civil rights are concerned, each man is not superior or inferior to any other man, and is equally bound with every other man to exercise his powers, his vigilance, designing wisdom and efficiency in the eternal duty of guiding, preserving and protecting the state; and that in all cases the will of a majority, not of any favored portion, but of all the people, shall be the law of the land."